Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
I'm trying to develop the MDI concept on gtkmm. We don't want
to use the
gnome libraries because we are evaluating only the gtkmm toolkit (we
don't even use direct calls to gtk+ functions). Using Gtk::Layout as
container it has been easy to emulate the MDI behaviour. The
problem is
that when a MDIchild contains a Gtk::ScrolledWindow, the
scrollbars seem
to be in a lower z-level than other widgets. So, when a MDIchild
(mdiChild1) is over another MDIchild (mdiChild2), all the widgets
comprised in mdiChild1 are over any widget comprised in mdiChild2,
except the scrollbars, that are below and seem to disappear
under mdiChild2.
Has anyone had a similar problem? What's wrong? What can I do?
I don't think that Gtk::Layout or any other GTK+ container is meant to
support overlapping widgets. I'm sure that some other people have tried to
implement window-in-window MDI. You might ask on gtk-list gnome org if you
do not find discussion in the archives. You might also ask there about
overlapping widgets in general.
But most people will tell you that window-in-window MDI is a bad UI design.
Please read the archives about why it is a bad UI design rather than
discussing again why it is a bad UI design. Tabbed-window MDI, as in gedit
or mozilla or epiphany, does not seem so bad.
But maybe you just want "window-in-window" and not any MDI at all, just so
you can show more than one window at a time. In this case, maybe you do not
really need the child windows to be in a parent window. Maybe it is enough
for the child windows to _belong_ to the parent window. Gimp, with it's
toolboxes, might be a example of this.
Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net
You are right about the window-in-window MDI concept. I read the
discussions about this subject, but anyway I tried to emulate this
behaviour to demonstrate the feasibility, or not, of doing it with
gtkmm. This is one among other features that we are evaluating. On this
case, all that we can do is to set forth the rationale of this
impossibility to our client in order to explain them why the
window-in-window MDI is a bad UI design.
Thank you very much for your prompt answer,
Luis
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